Passing Through the Flame (9 page)

Paul grimaced and fought his way through the people at one corner of the bar; a crowd of long-haired guys, all wearing fancy T-shirts printed with the names of rock groups or record companies and emblazoned with bizarre pictures, many of them in full color. Most of them had heaping platters of food—meatballs, salad, fried chicken, caviar—all slopped together in a nauseating melange which they shoveled greedily into their faces along with big swallows of free booze. They fought for the attention of a cool, good-looking brunette in a kelly-green dress, who leaned back against the bar smiling a PR smile at their unwholesome countenance.

“—thought their last album was a bit of a letdown—”

“—as I said in
Rolling Stone
last week—”

“—hasn’t had a real winner since ‘Black Strap Molasses’—”

“—when will there be a new Cloud album—”

“—quote from my column on the album, Sandy—”

The largest and most conspicuous of these characters—what were they, rock critics?—was a fat man with thin brown hair wearing a T-shirt with his own picture on it. He had a platter of food that was literally overflowing—bits and pieces dripping off the edges and onto the floor—in one unsteady hand and a big drink in the other, while trying to hold onto a brace of record albums tucked into each wet armpit. He was talking incessantly while doing this balancing act, and his enormous bulk completely blocked Paul from the bar.

“—I don’t know whether I’m ready to review Black wish yet, Sandy—”

“Excuse me.”

“—and I’m not sure they’re ready for the exposure that my column will give them—”

“Excuse me.”

“—of course, I might be persuaded to change my mind if I could have a quiet, private interview with Candy—”

“Will you please get out of the way?”

“—I understand she’s anxious to meet me anyway, and I—”

“That might be arranged, Artie,” the brunette said tiredly. “Of course
interview
doesn’t mean a promise of anything more....”

“—anything more
would be nice, but I—”

“Get your fat ass out of my way, Artie!” Paul shouted, grinning hugely and falsely when he finally gained the fat man’s attention. The rest of the T-shirt brigade looked at each other, at Artie, at Paul, chose not to react.

Artie himself didn’t seem to know how to react. By first-naming him in an insulting manner, Paul had implied that he knew him, that he was someone Artie should be on ass-kissing terms with. Artie was supposed to know who he was, but didn’t, and by the nature of his game, felt he couldn’t afford to betray his ignorance. So he puffed once or twice like a beached fish, smiled a sickly smile, and managed to make room at the bar for Paul.

Sandy-in-the-kelly-green-dress swallowed a laugh, gave Paul a smile, and a quick appraising once-over. Paul acknowledged this with a slight cocking of his head.

He ordered Velva’s martini and a bourbon on the rocks. When the drinks came, he pushed past the fat man. “See ya around, Artie,” he said.

“Who was that, Sandy?” Paul heard the fat man say behind him. “I remember the face, but the name is stuck on the tip of my tongue.”

“The Lone Ranger,” Sandy said dryly.

Paul returned to an unhappy Velva, who was standing nervously by herself as people milled around her, not noticing her fantastic body and her “star quality.” What am I doing here? Paul thought. Playing ego games with greasy rock critics and nursemaiding a pornie starlet who’s already been here ten minutes without being discovered. He took a good belt of bourbon and wished he had ordered a double.

“You sure took long enough,” Velva said, tasting her horrible martini with a sour pucker.

“The bar was surrounded by brilliant conversationalists. Couldn’t tear myself away.”

“Huh?”

“Forget it, let’s look around the set.”

Paul chose one of the archways at random, and led her through it. Soft red light illuminated a hippie-Oriental style room: cushions of various sizes, shapes, and colors on a deep-pile beige rug. Four large brass hookahs, and sandalwood incense burning on the lap of a brass Buddha. Low, vaguely Indian music coming from a cassette machine in one corner. Two more archways leading into two more rooms. About a dozen people were lying on cushions, sucking at the hoses of the hookahs, talking quietly to each other. The women were young, for the most part rather gaunt, and they were dressed in expensive-looking hippie-style clothing: hand-embroidered muu-muus, beaded suede, robes of silk. The men were mostly longhaired types in extravagant and elegantly tailored ultra-mod suits, lots of suede, silk, leather, and bright colors.

“—shipment from Munich was three weeks late, so I—”

“—at least Jango doesn’t bullshit you along when he—”

“—dynamite, but a little short—”

“—better than a good count of lousy hash—”

“—depending on how righteous you feel you have to be—”

“Here, man, have a hit,” said a man with long blond hair and a matching full beard, handing Paul the carved bone mouthpiece of a hookah hose. Paul took a moderate drag, and found his lungs seared by a lungful of harsh, powerful hashish.

Beside him, Velva broke into a hacking cough; smoke poured out of her nose and mouth. Soft laughter filled the room. Velva handed the hookah hose back to a black man in a cream-colored suit.

“Righteous shit, ain’t it?” the black man said with a sly grin. Velva grabbed Paul by the hand and just about dragged him through an archway into another room. This one was done up as an ordinary living room: couches, chairs, coffee tables, subdued white lighting from conventional lamps. The people here looked like conventional cocktail party types—the men in conventional suits, the women in cocktail dresses and pants suits. The major exception was a balding man with a rather unkempt beard, in baggy gray pants and an old brown corduroy jacket with leather elbow patches. Paul recognized him as Barry Stein, editor, publisher, and founder of the Los Angeles
Flash,
America’s oldest and largest-selling underground newspaper. He was sitting in a quiet corner talking with a dapper little man with shiny silver hair, and he looked as if he had wandered into the wrong reality.

Velva walked up to the silver-haired man, smiled, and said, “Hello, Mr. Marvin.”

The little man looked up, acknowledged her body, gave her face a totally blank stare.

“Velva Leecock,” she said. “I’ve been in several movies you’ve backed.”

“That’s marvelous,” Marvin said. “If you’ll excuse me....” He ignored Velva and continued his conversation with Stein. “You think those sons of bitches like me any more than they do you....”

Velva stood there pouting for a moment, then came back to Paul. “Damn,” she muttered, “that’s the first person I’ve seen here that I know at all.”

“Who is he?”

“Don’t you know? That’s Harry Marvin.”

“The porn king?”

“Of course,” Velva said. “I’ve been in half a dozen movies he’s backed, and he wouldn’t even
talk
to me!”

Paul shook his head ruefully. The chance of Harry Marvin publicly recognizing one of his fuck film stars at a party was about zilch. Marvin was one of the uncrowned kings of porn—films, books, magazines, fetish items, who knew what else. Just his printing operation in the San Fernando Valley occupied three big factory buildings. But what was he doing talking to Barry Stein? A very strange party, this was....

A sudden hush came over the room as a tall, powerfully built man marched in, stood in the center of the room for a moment, raking the area with laser-hard blue eyes. He had nearly shoulder-length brown hair and a thick mustache, but he stood and moved like a crew-cut marine or a hyperthyroid Green Beret. Every muscle in his face and body was taut, and his eyes radiated both fear and potential death. He studied every man in the room in turn with quick, machinelike flicks of his eyes, then without a word marched double time through the far archway, leaving a chill behind.

Paul’s eyes had followed him out of the room and as the man disappeared through the archway, Paul noticed the small, casterlike wheels at either side of the arch. He looked along the base of the wall and discovered a narrow gap between the bottom of the wall and the floor. At the next corner, the wall was supported by more casters. Glancing upward, Paul saw that there was a one-foot gap between the top of the wall and the ceiling. A quick look around showed him that all of the walls were mounted on wheels.

“My God,” he muttered, “it’s a set!”

“What?”

“This room is just four flats on wheels. Come on, come on, let’s take a quick run-through the whole house. I wonder if it’s all like this.”

He led Velva through an archway and into a room bathed in ultraviolet light. The walls fluoresced in eye-killing spirals of dayglo red, blue, aquamarine. One entire wall was a gigantic day-glo poster of a white man with a huge afro; his eyes were green-in-blue spirals that seemed to go on down forever. A young longhair in patched blue jeans and a T-shirt was playing a barely audible ghost tune on an unplugged electric guitar. Another longhair sat beside him beating time on a low table with a roach clip; the third man on the couch was tossing his stringy hair in time to the beat. Five young girls sat on the floor staring up worshipfully at this trio. On the table was a stone bowl filled with pills and capsules of various sizes, shapes, and colors, looking like a big dish of candy.

Here too, the walls were flats mounted on wheels. All the rooms in here must be sets, Paul thought. I wonder how many there are?

The light in the next room was soft green. Two big semicircular couches faced each other across a round table. John Horst, president of EPI—a well-preserved fiftyish man with blond hair fading into silver at his temples—was holding court over a collection of minor actors and actresses and people who looked like writers and directors. A handsome middle-aged woman in a blue cocktail dress sat somewhat stonily at his side.

“Isn’t that John Horst?” Velva whispered in Paul’s ear.

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, let’s sit down.”

“Not now.”

“Look, Paul, I came here to—”

A harried-looking man in royal-blue double-breasted suit, yellow shirt, and royal-blue tie entered the room. Conversation immediately stopped, and Horst’s expansive face became a wooden mask.

“Hello, Mike,” he said with cold formality.

“Hello, John. Seen Jango around yet?”

“No.”

“Ummm....”The man in the blue suit nodded, extracted a joint from a gold cigarette case, lit it, and left the room puffing nervously. Horst painted a suave smile back on his face and went on where he had left off.

“We’ve got several features in the works right now, including a science-fiction project which could be the picture of the year if we can work out the production problems. It’s based on a book called
The Demolished Man,
and the script—”

“Let’s sit down, Paul. If we can get to meet John Horst....”

“Oh, fer—Look, Velva, you’re not going to make contact here, and besides, I want to see the rest of the house.”

“Well, I want to stay here.”

“Okay, then you stay here. I’ll look around, and I’ll meet you back here in ten minutes.”

Velva pouted, then nodded and sat down next to a redhead at least as good-looking as she was. Paul turned, sighed, felt relieved, and wondered why. Something was percolating up from the basement of his mind, and he wanted as few distractions as possible. He wanted to drink in this strange party, because the something that was knocking on the door of his consciousness had something to do with the party, with the rooms that were nothing more than sets thrown together in a random pattern.... Or
was
it random?

The next room he entered was a visual torture chamber. The walls were mirrors, and the only light was a harsh white strobe that broke time up into intervals of blinding glare and deep blackness, making everything seem to jerk and flicker like an old-time movie. No one stayed here very long; there wasn’t even any furniture. People staggered through the room in starts and flashes, like an agitated and overpopulated tank of tropical fish; a starlet, a biker, a handsome older woman in a gray dress, an ethereal longhair who might’ve been Tiny Tim, someone in what looked like an Air Force uniform. The eye couldn’t form coherent images, and the mind began to fracture.

Paul reeled through an archway and into the next set. Soft synthetic firelight radiated from a large frosted globe mounted high on a pedestal in the center of the room. Low couches were placed against the two archless walls. Small tables in front of each couch held bowls of neatly rolled joints. On one couch, three men in their thirties sat listening to a striking-looking man who could have been thirty or fifty. He was naked to the waist, wore red velvet pants, and had shoulder-length straight blond hair contrasting strangely with his unmistakably Indian features.

“—so you’ve got to look at the Hollywood star system as a palette, the way an artist looks at his paints. If you want a John Wayne colored character, why, you cast John Wayne. Everyone knows what a John Wayne character is like, so as soon as old Duke walks on camera, he brings all the character depth from all those other movies—”

The other couch was empty, and Paul dropped onto it. What a weird party, he thought, and what a layout! He visualized a huge sound stage divided into many small rooms—actually sets—by these flats on wheels. Each set was a different reality, and they were all interconnected in many different ways, like a multi-solution maze, so that you could wander around in them indefinitely, lose your sense of direction, until the party, the endless maze of reality sets, became your whole universe....

“—even minor characters. Let Henry Silva walk into a party scene and things suddenly get awfully ominous—”

Beck’s only missed one bet, Paul thought. If you could mount the wheeled walls on tracks and power the wheels with little electric motors, you could wire the whole thing into a control panel and keep changing the configurations of the sets as the party goes on. The guests would wander through ever-changing realities, and whoever was controlling the whole little universe could change the sets around them according to his whim, setting up juxtapositions, conflicts, stories, subplots....